The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (13 page)

For Breslin, the greatest New York stories were to be found among the city’s working class, the low-level wage earners who kept the city’s industry churning. They worked in Manhattan, but they lived in the outer boroughs with another substratum of the working class: the shysters, the numbers runners, the small-time gangsters. Class was Breslin’s big subject; he wanted to show readers what it was like “out there” across the bridges, among the dispossessed who had been ill served by the uptown New York media, maligned by their crude stereotypes. Mostly Breslin wanted to share his ardor for New York in all its multifarious, gritty glory. “New York is all I know,” said Breslin. “It’s all I care about.” Like George Eliot or V. S. Pritchett, Breslin innately understood that everyone was interesting. They just needed someone to tell their stories for them. “On the surface, the
Tribune
was this dignified, Republican
newspaper,” said Tom Wolfe, who was hired as a general assignment reporter in 1961. “But it also gained this following of the cab drivers with the cap over one eye, and Jimmy had a lot to do with that.”

A big, hulking Irishman who stood nearly six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds, Breslin resembled a Greco-Roman wrestler gone to seed. Add to that his voice—a reedy, adenoidal screech filtered through a heavy Ozone Park accent—and Breslin could easily insinuate himself into any scenario that had story potential. “It’s news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet,” said Breslin. “The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor. Anything you’re looking for is four and five flights up.”

Breslin, who never learned how to drive, conducted all of his research on foot. Often accompanied by his wife, Rosemary, he would just walk the streets, sniffing out stories in tenement buildings and Irish bars, making crucial contacts and a few lasting friends along the way. Equally as important was Breslin’s ability to hold his drink. Breslin once remarked that the best story ideas were the ones that sounded good after the hangover had worn off. Breslin’s story foraging frequently happened in bars, usually Pep McGuire’s place on Queens Boulevard. Pep McGuire’s was Breslin’s salon, the meeting place where the reporter befriended the shady, Runyonesque characters who would people his columns for the
Trib
.

For many of his earliest columns Breslin used the raw material of his childhood: the kids in the neighborhood who “were a little poorer than some, a little more Irish than others, a little closer to the racetrack than most.” “Marvin the Torch” was about a four-hundred-pound bookie friend of Breslin’s who moonlighted as an arsonist, setting fire to money-losing businesses so that the owners could collect the insurance money. Like so many of Breslin’s greatest pieces, “Marvin the Torch” was a short story disguised as a newspaper story; it read like nothing in the
Trib
or any other newspaper. Breslin wasn’t interested in pat morality plays or the rote condescension that usually accompanied stories about petty criminals. His affection is obvious, but to Breslin, Marvin was just another working stiff, selling his services to the highest bidder. It began:

Marvin is hired to torch a custard stand located “on the wrong side of an amusement park”; for kicks, he intends to “make the roof blow straight up into the air without bending the nails in it.” Instead, a “good south wind” carries the fire out of control: “Marvin the Torch’s favor job on the custard stand had also belted out most of a million-and-a-half-dollar amusement park.” It was like something out of an old George Raft film, but it was happening in present-day New York, and Breslin could bring it to life with more verisimilitude and gallows humor than any other metro reporter in the city.

“Jerry the Booster” was the story of a small-time department store shoplifter, a charming rake with a propensity to stuff 42-regular suits down his size-60 pants.

Like Gay Talese, Breslin was using dialogue to elucidate character, but instead of pathos, Breslin went for laughs. Sure, Jerry the Booster was a crook, but Breslin knew that the city would be a very dull place without guys like Jerry around. “Jimmy was incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era,” said Tom Wolfe. “He turned out that column five times a week, and practically all of it was reporting. He introduced Queens to New York.”

Breslin often didn’t sit down at his typewriter until 4 P.M. or later, and then he’d make a mad dash to his 5:30 deadline. “When everyone else would be filing to the subway to go home, I’d be going in the opposite direction, headed toward my typewriter at the
Tribune
,” said Breslin. “I felt guilty about it, but I never missed a deadline.” Breslin would plunk himself down at a desk in the city room, hunching himself, according to Tom Wolfe, “into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until vapor started drifting off his body. He looked like a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man write so well against a daily deadline.” By the time he pulled the last page out of his typewriter, Breslin’s desk would becovered in a sea of crumpled notes and Styrofoam coffee cups, his copy a spiderweb of handwritten cross-outs and scribbled revisions. Somehow the words always scanned on the page. Editor Sheldon “Shelly” Zalaznick characterized Breslin’s deadline crunching as “absolutely heart-stopping, but I never remember him ever missing a deadline.”

As someone who shared the same troubled origins as many of his interview subjects, Breslin skillfully endeared himself to even the most intransigent and cynical among them. A back slap and a few rounds of beers were effective social lubricants, but Breslin’s avuncular demeanor closed the deal. He was just like them, another poor schmuck behind on his rent and his gambling debts. “Jimmy had the knack, he still does, of becoming your instant best friend,” said former
Tribune
national editor Richard Wald. “And he was a very exacting reporter. He took reams of notes, until he had the name, rank, and serial number of everyone he interviewed.”

Breslin’s colorful reprobates were engaged in a commedia dell’ arte of the city’s underworld, the elaborate scheming and double-dealing of the criminal class. The
Trib’s
readers lapped it up; Breslin became the
Trib’s
first writing star of the 1960s, profiled in the national newsweeklies and envied by his colleagues. But Breslin’s inside peek into a subterranean culture was regarded with suspicion by a number of his fellow journalists, mainly because the stories seemed too good to be true. Breslin’s gifts as a writer were obvious, but did he make it all up?

The
New York Times’s
metropolitan editor A. M. Rosenthal thought so, so one day he went to Pep McGuire’s to see for himself. Breslin column regular Fat Thomas was at the bar; another thuggish Breslin favorite nicknamed Cousin was in the office; Mafia figure James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke was nursing a beer a few stools away from Thomas. It all checked out.

One day in March 1964, Breslin was drinking in Bleeck’s when an anonymous messenger boy walked in and told Breslin to meet Charlie Workman at the Port Authority that afternoon. This was a strange message to receive from a man Breslin assumed was behind bars. Workman, also known as Charlie the Bug, was one of Murder Inc.’s most prolific killers; his most notorious hit, the murder of Harlem kingpin Dutch Schultz, had landed him in the state prison in Trenton, New Jersey, for twenty-three years. When Workman, accompanied by his brother, Abe, and his wife, Catherine, met Breslin, he was only a few hours out of prison on parole. He wanted Breslin to be the first to know.

Breslin’s editor, Buddy Weiss, had too much faith in Breslin’s skill as a reporter to question his veracity, but he did allow him a certain degree of creative latitude regarding dialogue and the use of minor details to enliven some of his more fanciful set pieces. “Jimmy was so clearly over the top that you couldn’t take it seriously,” said Richard Wald. “And if the story wasn’t serious, there wasn’t the same amount of probity devoted to it. There was a lot of exaggeration in what Jimmy wrote, a lot of charged language and wild, crazy fabulations about the city, but he didn’t invent the people. I met Marvin the Torch. Of course, his name wasn’t Marvin.”

But Breslin occasionally threw the names of people he knew into his stories, people who had no business being in there. For an article about a mob hit that had taken place on Queens Boulevard, Breslin implied that the real target of the murder, Joseph Buchwald, had had the good fortune of not being in town that day. Buchwald was the father of the
Tribune’s
Paris correspondent, Art Buchwald, and he had no connection whatsoever
with Breslin’s story. “That really upset my father, when Jimmy did that,” said Art Buchwald. “He was implying that my father had something to do with the mob, when he didn’t. But Jimmy just shrugged it off, and the people he worked for were delighted by this stuff.”

Weiss knew that Breslin would often disguise the names in his stories to protect the guilty, but he would often take issue with some of the earthy language that Breslin used. As a man who could give as good as he got, Weiss wasn’t cowed by Breslin, and the two would fight and yell at each other in the city room, making their arguments public spectacles, but Breslin never backed down. He wouldn’t change his copy for anyone, not even the men who were cutting his checks every week. When Zalaznick, the editor of the
Trib’s
Sunday magazine supplement, tried to change a few words in a story, Breslin accused him of being underhanded in an attempt to “tunnel under me” and destroy his integrity. “Breslin was a bad guy to tangle with,” said Zalaznick. “He could be very tough, but underneath it all I thought he was a very decent human being.”

Pack journalism was anathema to Breslin; if a clutch of reporters was feverishly heading in one direction, Breslin would hightail it the other way, in search of the real story. The best examples of this were the series of stories he filed in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. This was a story Breslin knew he had to cover; aside from his affinity for the nation’s first Irish Catholic president, Breslin felt it crystallized, in one horrible moment, the nation’s tendency toward senseless violence that had torn apart America’s cities. Breslin arrived in Dallas on the twenty-second, just intime for the press conference with Kennedy’s doctors, including Dr. Malcolm Oliver Perry II, the attending ER surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital, who had tried in vain to resuscitate the dead president. While the other reporters grilled the doctors about the chronology of events leading up to Kennedy’s death, Breslin carefully probed Perry about his personal impressions, the thoughts that had raced through his mind when the president’s lifeless body was wheeled into view. Perry was nonplussed by Breslin’s line of inquiry; what direct bearing did it have on the tragedy at hand?

But the assassination itself was being covered amply from every conceivable angle; Breslin wanted to bring this national tragedy down to human scale, telescope it into the story of Dr. Perry’s futility as
he confronted a national tragedy. Breslin’s dispatch, called “A Death in Emergency Room One,” ran in the
Trib’s
November 24 edition, and began:

Breslin clinically enumerates Perry’s usual operating procedure, the standard routine for gravely wounded gunshot victims, while Jacqueline Kennedy, “a tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt,” stands nearby, observing it all with a “tearless… terrible discipline.” Finally Perry defers to a priest for the last rites: